Paula Becker and Alan Stein

Before Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, or even Boeing, there was the Klondike Gold Rush that began in 1897. And Seattles port-town provisioning of the miners basically established this city. Alaska, in a sense, put us on the map. Thus the 1909 extravaganza documented in the photo-history Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Washingtons First Worlds Fair (HistoryLink, $29.95) by Alan J. Stein and Paula Becker. Today theyll show and discuss images from extensive local archives at MoHaI and the UWwhich incorporated much of the Olmsted Brothers AYP design into todays campus. The tourist rides, pseudo-educational displays, and international pavilions are all gone, of course. (My favorite: The Upside Down House.) But their spirit lives on in SeaFair each year and in the Seattle Center remnants of the 1962 Worlds Fair. Before it was cool to scoff at growth (or worry about economic busts), Seattle was proud of its sudden boomtown prominence. (Sept. 17 at Eagle Harbor Books; Sept. 30 at Third Place.) BRIAN MILLER